by Adam Light
Greg pulled into his oil-stained driveway. Thirty minutes of his lunch break remained. Before he could attempt to unlock the front door, he realized that it stood open a few inches already. In his haste this morning, he must have forgotten to pull the door closed all the way. The thought comforted him, but he still eased the door open tentatively, hoping he was not walking into a robbery in progress. He peered warily into the sunlit interior of his living room.
The sensible part of him tried to assert control. Why would anyone want to rob him? There was nothing of considerable value in his humble home. His voice of reason was less than convincing, so he decided to announce his presence before entering.
In his best authoritative voice, Greg shouted, “Hey, you in there! What do you think you’re doing?”
He waited for a moment, unsure if he should expect a home invader to acknowledge their presence.
Feeling apprehensive, he walked inside. He left the front door open behind him, telling himself he would only be there long enough to grab his wallet. Confident that he must have left it on the kitchen counter this morning, he headed there first.
Halfway into the kitchen, he stopped walking. Something here felt wrong, incongruous. Greg’s television and stereo were still there in front of the window. No one had made off with his couch or threadbare recliner. A half-finished book rested on the arm of the couch with a chewing gum wrapper for a marker - just as he had left it. There was no evidence of a robbery.
Everything appeared fine, yet everything also seemed out of place. Again, Greg felt that sense of emptiness here. It almost felt as if he was in the wrong house.
The laundry stacked against the wall beside him made him feel uneasy again. He brushed it off and told himself it was nothing - he should just get what he came for and grab some lunch before it was too late.
His sense of purpose renewed, Greg continued into the kitchen.
Shockingly, the microwave clock read 4:35. Greg saw that digital readout, and then the numbers faded and disappeared completely.
This latest jump in time sent his mind reeling. He looked at his wrist, and noticed something strange there, too. He always had the same wrist. It just looked naked. There was a tan line where his watch should be. A nervous flutter of butterflies in his stomach overpowered even the worst pangs of hunger within him. He held his hands out and watched his fingers jitter and twitch.
One sneakered foot planted on the kitchen linoleum, the other resting hesitantly on the shag carpet of his living room, he fought back the urge to vomit up the remnants of his mustard breakfast.
After a few moments, he felt better. His hands stopped shaking and the wrongness he had felt since entering his home subsided to a tolerable level. He looked for his wallet in earnest again, and was not exactly surprised to find that it was nowhere in sight. The refrigerator was completely empty now. It was warm inside, and the light bulb was not working. Greg backed out of the kitchen into the living room again.
Perhaps his wallet was on the nightstand next to his bed. As he took his first steps in that direction, a cloud passed over the sun, painting the inside of his house with dark shadows. His own shadow grew large on the wall in front of him. It shrunk back as the cloud passed away, and premature afternoon sunshine attempted to brighten the room again. A squall of wind howled against the vinyl siding of the house as thunder rumbled in the distance.
He needed light but nothing happened when he flipped the hall light switch.
“What the hell?” he asked the emptiness.
Thunder cracked. It was closer this time. It sounded sinister, malevolent, even. He toggled the light switch and the light in the hall remained dead. He gave up on it after a few tries and turned to look out the window. A large column of ominous black clouds loomed above the pines and oaks that towered above the row of humble houses that lined his street. The storm had arrived out of nowhere, the darkness rolled in with it. He gaped as a skeletal lightning hand reached from roiling clouds and streaked its way across the sky, leaving a ghostly afterimage behind.
From behind him inside the house, Greg heard what sounded like the ceiling collapsing to the floor in his bedroom.
The unexpected noise made him jump, and he spun around, waving his arms wildly. He flipped on other light switches, but the power was out. He walked ninja-silent to the kitchen and gently opened the utensil drawer. He delicately extracted the largest knife he could find. It was only a butter knife, but it would have to do. Now armed - albeit poorly - Greg sneaked back onto the carpeted border of the living room and poked his head around the dividing wall.
Get out of here, Greg! Run! Reason ordered him.
To remain here was madness, but Greg was unable to retreat. He was pinned in his spot and no more able to run than the date palm that grew in the center of his front lawn. There was no running now. Today was a very important day, he was sure; a day of revelations playing in the shadows of his consciousness – revelations he may not be able to cope with.
He looked down at his pathetic excuse for a weapon. Though it felt rather useless, he gripped it ferociously. He brandished it like a sword. If someone attacked him, he was going for his or her eyeball. The thought of sinking the little harmless-looking kitchen utensil deep inside the intruder’s skull via his eye socket relaxed Greg considerably. He pried himself free from the clutches of panic that had fossilized him in the kitchen.
Again, he began the death-row march down the hall. A shrill resonance erupted from his bedroom and his fear swelled, threatening to burst inside of him. It sounded like someone was jumping up and down on his bed. Springs squeaked, groaned, and shrieked.
All the courage he had mustered went out of him, like a slowly deflating balloon. He backed into the living room and an odd thought occurred to him. He once more surveyed the laundry stacked against the wall. Had he torn that pile of clothes apart this morning?
Yes, he had thrown socks, underwear, pants and shirts all over the place, and had not cleaned up the mess. Yet the clothes he observed were stacked and folded just as neatly as before his crazed shoe hunt had begun.
Understanding was blooming like a nightshade within his delirious mind, and Greg momentarily teetered on the edge of epiphany. Thunder smacked again outside, and he almost dropped his knife and ran screaming out the door. It was a ridiculous thought, but the thunder actually sounded angry, as if nature’s fury was assaulting him personally.
Dazzling flashes of lightning were growing faster and more brilliant as the storm suffocated the daylight out of Greg’s house. Their bright bursts were creating a stroboscopic effect inside the house. His head pounded in rhythm with the pulsating lightning.
It was growing darker in the house, save for nature’s light show, and Greg desperately began trying every wall switch in living room and hall again. None of them worked. He did not know what else to do.
Had he forgotten to pay the utility bill? He thought he must have. There was no time to be concerned with such trivial matters, though. At least, not when there was an intruder, or intruders, in his bedroom, threatening his survival.
The grinding and shrieking of bedsprings stopped. Greg wondered if he had even heard the sounds at all. He wondered if perhaps he had lost his mind. Bristling with fear, Greg began the long walk down the short corridor again, the dull blade of the butter knife shoved out in front of him. Behind him, lightning sparkled and rain hammered the roof and windows.
Halfway to his bedroom, he peeked over his shoulder and noticed the closed front door. He knew he had left it open. Instinct led his hand to his front pocket, in search of keys that were no longer there. They must be in the car.
Perhaps this was not happening at all. Greg thought there was a large possibility that he was asleep at his desk at work, dreaming all of it. This thought gave birth to new courage. This had to be a dream. How else could any of it make sense?
An eerie scraping noise came from the bedroom. It was like a knife being drawn across a pane of glass. Greg cringed a
t the sound of it and slunk several steps backwards. There came the sound of someone, or something rummaging through his dresser drawers.
The storm raged full force now outside and the house was subsequently alive with dancing shadows.
Greg felt afraid, but he still managed to put one foot in front of the other. Sweat beaded on his forehead and trickled into his eyes. Greg wiped it from his face with his forearm, and then wiped his forearm on his pants leg. When he did this, he noticed his feet were bare. He had no memory of removing his shoes and socks, but they were gone. His palms were so sweaty that he could no longer feel the cool reassurance of the butter knife clenched in his fist. He tried to switch it to his other hand, but then realized the knife, like so many other objects in the last few minutes, had also vanished.
Greg hesitated just outside his bedroom door, and listened carefully for any movement within. The door was open; he could see less than half of his room through the darkness, the rest of it concealed by the hallway wall.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something that caught him off guard. A large picture frame was hanging on the wall to his right. He was sure that it had not been there a minute ago. Upon further inspection, he realized it was not actually hanging on the wall; it was literally hovering in front of the wall.
Greg plucked it from where it floated in the air and held it in front of his face, examining it. It was a collage of pictures arranged behind stark white matting. He could barely make out the faces smiling through the grimy glass, but they began to sharpen into focus after a few moments. He gaped, fish eyed, at what he saw.
Every picture in the frame contained Greg, Kirsten and Lilly, the girl from McDonalds.
They were in various poses in different locales – smiling, kissing, and waving at the photographer. As more details emerged from the pictures, he attempted to connect memories with them. He did not understand this at all. Despite his best efforts, Greg was unable to make any sense of what he was seeing.
Another cacophonous blast from the bedroom distracted him from the lovingly arranged photos, and he decided he would study them more closely after dealing with the intruder, although he was sure there was no one back there. He gently set the large frame against the wall and entered the foreboding bedroom.
It was uninhabited, just as he had come to expect. His bed occupied most of the floor space and he was surprised to find it neatly made, three big fluffy pillows lined up along the headboard. A bouquet of flowers lay across the middle pillow, stems bound together by a thick blue wrap of silk tied in a bow.
On the pillow closest to him rested an envelope, the solitary word “Daddy” written in a child’s scrawl in crayon across the front. The rain had stopped its pounding on the windows, he realized, and glanced at the wall in his bedroom. It was now a smooth, flat, and solid wall. The window was gone.
Get out get out get out NOW!!!!! His ever-diminishing rationale screamed from within.
Even in the dark, he could see an old thumbprint near the corner on the wall’s smooth surface, a small scar accidentally left behind when he had painted the room years ago. This minute detail had an enormous effect on Greg, unleashing a tidal wave of unrecognized memories, and his mind strained to the breaking point as he attempted to process everything that was happening here.
Without any warning, a vivid memory played out like a scene in a movie in front of his eyes:
Kirsten flinging gobs of paint off the end of her dripping paintbrush, laughing and twirling around in her bare feet atop the layers of plastic tarp they had spread to protect the carpet. Him, dipping his brush into a pan, painting a white stripe down the front of her shirt. The room half painted and filled with their laughter, a baby wailing from a crib in another room.
The scene ended as quickly as it had begun. Greg was alone in the dark. He touched his cheek, half-expecting to find a glob of wet paint clinging to his face. There was no paint, but his face was wet.
His room had grown darker than the other side of the grave. He felt like curling up into the fetal position and having a nice nervous breakdown on the floor.
Instead, he walked back into the hallway, and hoisted the big picture frame from where he had set it against the wall.
He studied the photographs of himself with family. How could this be real?
Despite the fact that his hands now were trembling severely, the picture frame remained dead still in his hands. Greg stared in disbelief at his face staring back at him from the photos. Numbness started to spread through his body in an urgent, almost conscious way. Before it completely took hold of him, he made his way back to the hall and hung the heavy frame on the wall by his bedroom door. There was no nail, but the picture stayed where it was. The shuffling noise in his bedroom started again.
Greg crept back into the bedroom to find Kirsten and Lilly sitting on the floor, surrounded by boxes. Sanity was draining away with the speed of stampeding stallions now. The boxes held numerous familiar items. Greg noticed his wallet in one of the boxes. His watch accompanied it. The girls were busy filling a box with dozens of loose pictures, ones that had never found a home in any of the dozens of picture albums they had filled over the years.
Lilly gripped a five by seven photograph, one she had apparently saved for herself. She clutched it to her chest and hugged it fiercely. As Kirsten watched her daughter’s precious display of love, tears welled up in her eyes. She placed her fingertips delicately upon her child’s forearm. Lilly kept hugging the picture, eyes tightly closed, grinning and swaying back and forth on her heels. Neither of them acted as if they knew that Greg shared the room with them.
As he opened his mouth to ask them what they were doing in his room, the girls and their keepsakes vanished as though they were ghosts. Only the photo Lilly had been hugging remained. Greg watched it float feather-like toward his outstretched hands. He snatched it out of the air and looked upon it, again experiencing a stab of déjà vu.
In the photo, Lilly sat hunched over Greg’s shoulders, her little fists twisted up in his hair, her legs wrapped tightly around his throat for balance. The unmistakable stark white spire of Space Mountain in the background revealed that the location was Disney World. He saw that they were both laughing and sticking their tongues out at the photographer. The goofy tone of the picture tempered Greg’s feelings of bewilderment, and for a moment, he was nearly himself again. His mouth attempted to birth a smile, but it was stillborn upon his lips.
A soft thud came from behind him. Greg spun around to find that the door to the hallway was now gone. There was only another smooth wall in need of a new coat of paint. He looked back at the picture in his hands but it was gone as well, apparently having followed everything else into the ether.
Confusion and fear ran like ice water through his veins. A splintered realization unfolded within, and the brutal certainty of his situation was rearing its ugly head before him.
This is insane, he thought.
In the shadows, the envelope still lay like a coiled asp upon his pillow. The flowers were now dried and flaking, the petals rotting away on a dusty old pillow. A folded piece of yellowed notebook paper lay next to the torn envelope. He felt himself begin to float across the floor toward it, or perhaps it was moving towards him. Nothing was certain.
Fearful of the ominous folded page, yet helplessly drawn to it, Greg exhaled sharply and willed the letter to him. It flew from the pillow into his hands. Shuddering, he rubbed his thumbs cautiously over the top of it.
A child had obviously written the letter. In the gloom, the letters on the paper were already fading away.
He read:
Dear Da dy,
I’m sorry had to take away
but are always my ve.
I’m sorry y ed.
mommy you will be
w hing over us
I m ss ou.
L ve, Lilly
He grasped at the meaning within the words as the letters on the page faded and blurred and erased themselves fro
m existence. The answer still eluded him.
He worked his fingers into the palms of his hands, hoping to pierce the soft skin with his fingernails. All he wanted was to awaken from this nightmare, to see the morning sun slanting through the bedroom window. A loss so great that his heart could no longer handle it sank like an anchor in his chest.
The bedroom walls shrank inward, transforming his inner sanctum into a fish bowl. Greg again felt as if he was moving around with no effort at all. Legs no longer under his command carried him to the bed. There, he lay down and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the ceiling was no more than an inch from his face. His hands were like dead weight at the end of his arms. He tried to scream but his vocal cords no longer responded to his brain’s commands; his mouth produced only silence.
Violent spasms of pain erupted throughout his body. An avalanche of suffering threatened to suck the consciousness out of him. The ceiling tightened against his chest, pinning him to the bed. This was no longer his bedroom. He was back in his car. Blood was flowing from him freely from where the steering column crushed horribly into his chest. In terror, Greg saw that the engine block was on his legs.